Center For a Just Society at the John Jay Institutehttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org
Wed, 29 Jul 2015 13:47:40 +0000en-UShourly1http://feeds.feedburner.com/cjs-podcastThe Center for a Just Society seeks to provide truly conservative answers to liberal concerns. The CJS weekly podcast features various articles produced by the Center on a variety of topics including politics, religion, poverty, human dignity and bioethics.Center For a Just Society at the John Jay InstitutecleanCenter For a Just Society at the John Jay Instituteinfo@centerforajustsociety.orginfo@centerforajustsociety.org (Center For a Just Society at the John Jay Institute)for justice and human dignityCenter For a Just Society at the John Jay Institutehttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/CJS-iTunes-Logo-e1263497929206.jpghttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org
The Reality of Abortion Exposedhttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org/the-reality-of-abortion-exposed/
http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/the-reality-of-abortion-exposed/#commentsWed, 29 Jul 2015 13:46:52 +0000http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/?p=39541“Unless you stand for something, you will fall for anything.” Everyone is familiar with this famous quote, though its original origins are unknown. What is known is that the sentiment appeared in a prayer offered by Senate Chaplain Peter Marshall in 1947. “Our Father,” Marshall prayed, “we yearn for a better understanding of spiritual things, that we may know surely what Thy will is for us and for our Nation. Give to us clear vision that we may know where to stand and what to stand for – because unless we stand for something, we shall fall for anything.”

This idea endures and people respond to it because deep down everyone recognizes that adherence to principle over pragmatism, especially when it’s hard, is a virtuous thing. For the last 43 years, those who affirm the sanctity of human life from the moment of conception to the point of natural death have stood in the vanguard of opposition to abortion. Despite the sands of culture shifting around them, despite being dismissed as fools and decried as would-be oppressors, these individuals have refused to give way and refused to be silenced. Unlike many of their friends and neighbors, they never bought into the poisonous notion that the termination of an unwanted pregnancy is merely a medical “choice” made by a woman and her doctor. What they have always known – and what the rest of America is beginning to understand – is that abortion is nothing less than state-sanctioned killing of our tiniest and most vulnerable demographic: unborn children. What’s more, we are learning that abortion is not merely a “service” provided by benevolent practitioners in the name of choice, but a profitable business that literally traffics in blood.

The media is still abuzz with talk of the recently released videos in which an undercover activist inquires about the purchase of fetal tissue harvested from aborted babies. In the first video, viewers are treated to a macabre scene in which a high-level Planned Parenthood official discusses – between bites of salad and sips of wine – how she and other abortionists preserve valuable fetal tissue during the procedure:

“… we’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m gonna basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact.”

Defenders of the organization and of abortion in general were quick to respond. The video was recorded under false pretenses! The video and the responses to it are nothing more than a smear campaign again an impeachable organization dedicated to women’s health! There’s no evidence that Planned Parenthood is profiting from the sale of fetal tissue! The donation of legally aborted fetal tissue is not illegal! Et cetera, et cetera, and ad nauseum.

But then the second video was released. In it, a Planned Parenthood executive is seen haggling over the organization’s rate for intact fetal organs in a way that indicates a profit-seeking motive. Her goal, she laughs, is a Lamborghini, so she wants to be sure she’s getting a competitive price for the baby parts she sells. Additionally, she reassures her prospective buyer that she can have her abortionist modify his techniques to ensure an “intact specimen” even though this might be a violation of federal law.

It doesn’t get more brazen than that. Of course, Planned Parenthood is still crying foul, accusing the operation behind the videos of manipulation and editing even though the full unedited videos were also published for all to see. In true Potemkin fashion, the powers-that-be at Planned Parenthood persist in their self-righteous insistence that nothing illegal or untoward occurs under their banner. The most they are willing to concede is that it might be in “poor taste” to discuss fetal murder and dismemberment over lunch.

Thanks to this undercover sting, it may be that finally Planned Parenthood’s veneer of respectability has been stripped away. According to its website, “for more than 90 years, Planned Parenthood has promoted a commonsense approach to women’s health and well-being, based on respect for each individual’s right to make informed, independent decisions about health, sex, and family planning.” What they don’t happily advertise is the monstrous philosophy of their founder, Margaret Sanger. An unabashed eugenicist, Ms. Sanger’s “commonsense” approach to unwanted pregnancies and undesirable demographic groups, such as minorities and the handicapped, was clear and unambiguous. She maintained that “the most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it,” and that “birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”

The women featured in the videos do Ms. Sanger proud. She was brutally honest about her disregard for the unborn, and so are her ideological and professional successors. The abhorrence of the procedure these executives discuss is utterly lost on them. They might as well be haggling over the price of a car or a piece of real estate. It seems from the response to these videos, however, that the American people see things differently. The fine legal nuances of the activities being discussed are irrelevant. What matters is that these people describe the crushing and dismemberment of unborn babies – the reality of abortion laid out in graphic detail.

Many women instinctively rally behind a woman’s “right to choose,” without giving much thought to the reality behind the choice at issue. So powerful has our delusion about the reality of abortion become – and so powerful the pro-abortion lobby behind Planned Parenthood – that our elected representatives allocate hundreds of millions of dollars each year to Planned Parenthood. This funding has withstood year after year of budget debates and political controversy. Planned Parenthood’s operatives peddle the myth that pregnancy and parenthood is some kind misogynistic social construct used to keep women dependent and servile. They tell women that the right to choose abortion is a right intricately tied to their female identity, rather than a betrayal of a sacred duty bestowed by the author of the universe. They tell women that choosing abortion is an empowering decision, not one that can impact future fertility and inflict emotional and psychological scars that last a lifetime.

What they don’t tell women is that there is a living, breathing, human being inside them that’s worth more to them dead and dismembered than it is to them born alive. They don’t tell women that the profits from the sale of their dead child’s body parts will go towards their Lamborghini down payment. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat summed up well the profound impact of these videos and the ugly truths they reveal:

“And the problem these videos create for Planned Parenthood isn’t just a generalized queasiness at surgery and blood. It’s a very specific disgust, informed by reason and experience — the reasoning that notes that it’s precisely a fetus’s humanity that makes its organs valuable, and the experience of recognizing one’s own children, on the ultrasound monitor and after, as something more than just “products of conception” or tissue for the knife.

“That’s why Planned Parenthood’s apologists have fallen back on complaints about “deceptive editing” (though full videos were released in both cases), or else simply asked people to look away. And it’s why many of my colleagues in the press seem uncomfortable reporting on the actual content of the videos.

“Because dwelling on that content gets you uncomfortably close to . . . that moment when you start pondering the possibility that an institution at the heart of respectable liberal society is dedicated to a practice that deserves to be called barbarism.”

Barbarism, indeed. It’s time for the American people – American women in particular – to face up to the gruesome reality of abortion. To willfully destroy human life, at any stage of development, is an act of evil and a gross betrayal of a sacred responsibility, that of one human being to another, and of a parent to his and her child. We cannot, we must not, look away.

]]>http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/the-reality-of-abortion-exposed/feed/0What the Sting Video Will and Won’t Achievehttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org/what-the-sting-video-will-and-wont-achieve/
http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/what-the-sting-video-will-and-wont-achieve/#commentsTue, 21 Jul 2015 17:58:07 +0000http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/?p=39536Much has been written since Tuesday’s breaking story on Planned Parenthood’s selling of fetal tissue from abortions. Not surprisingly, mainstream media outlets were slow to pick up the story, and many of them largely parroted the Planned Parenthood defense when writing their stories. The video caused quite the stir on social media, amassing countless shares and 2.4 million views on YouTube as of Tuesday. Interestingly, nearly all responses from the left and some from the right seem to miss the real reason for this impact. It is not so much that Planned Parenthood is doing something illegal or secretive (though it may well be violating multiple laws). It’s that this particular story brings into vivid relief the reality of what Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers do on a daily basis.

The killing of unborn children is so often out of sight and mind. For certain, pro-lifers have worked tirelessly to enact legislation to reduce the number of abortions, and they have made the case for life in public demonstrations and private conversations. But the average American rarely encounters the graphic details of abortion.

To hear Planned Parenthood executive Dr. Deborah Nucatola speak so clinically about the very human organs they harvest from these children and sell for scientific research – over a meal, no less – seems like something from a dystopian novel. Some liberal commentators are correct – the main thread of Planned Parenthood’s practice is legal and is likely sold to young mothers as the “generous” thing to do with the bodies of their unwanted children. As Planned Parenthood states, it’s for “life-saving scientific research”. Moreover it is not ethically much different from our decades-long practice of abortion.

Many people sharing this story on social media may indeed not have known that these “donations” are legal, but I suspect that this is not the real cause of the furor. The reality is that most Americans, especially casually pro-choice Americans, do not spend time thinking about the child that dies. They do not picture its body parts, its organs, its very real humanity. They don’t think about the forceps… the doctor using ultrasound in order to “crush” the life out of the baby while preserving the health of profitable organ tissue. Through this story they are confronted with the grisly reality of abortion and presented with the difficulty of maintaining their “woman’s choice” position in the light of dead baby parts.

The objections from pro-choice columnists have been weak. Some object that pro-lifers are hypocritical by only now filling Facebook and Twitter feeds with this grotesque story, but of course such an extreme and vivid version of this always-present horror will provoke such sharing. Many have claimed that the video is “highly edited” or sensationalistic or manipulative, but the moving part of the story is none of these things. The impactful center could not be clearer: unborn humans are being killed and their body parts sold off. The visceral reaction is legitimate. We have no problem talking about adults who have donated their organs. It is not the process of harvesting organs from the dead that is so troubling. This harvesting of the unborn is different precisely because it brings to the forefront the humanness of the babies that are killed. That is the motivating kernel.

Perhaps this story will lead to change. Perhaps it will further multiply the increasing number of Americans who are opposed to legal abortion in many-to-all cases. Perhaps it will lead to the eventual overturning of Roe v. Wade. In the very least, perhaps it will lead to cutting out the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars currently flowing into Planned Parenthood’s coffers. But there is a greater problem this is sadly unlikely to resolve.

While picturing a developed baby being dismembered and sold piecemeal will give many in the pro-choice camp pause, it is unlikely to lead many to a reconsideration of their philosophical position on human life. And the greatest threats to the unborn child today happen early in pregnancy, before the child is so tangibly human. Our developing technologies have led many more people to see the very-human nature of a near-term unborn child. This is why pro-lifers have advocated for ultrasounds before a woman commits to an abortion. The humanity of the child is visually evident. But a first-trimester child does not look so much like a baby, and most abortions in the future will be achieved in these early stages through pharmaceutical advances.

The core question is plain: When does a human become a human? Human life demands our protection. There is no sliding scale of human dignity, dependent on how convenient the life is or how difficult it is to protect that life. Ultimately there are only two real options: Either accept that human life begins at a set point and protect it from that point on, or proceed down the Peter Singer road of the utilitarian ranking of humanity. The average American would prefer to avoid committing to one position or the other, but this story brings to the forefront the reality produced by our passive abdication of our moral responsibility to think, decide, and protect.

If, as I believe, human life begins at conception, then a bunch of cells that looks little like a human is indeed human and its life is worthy of our full protection. Thus our increasingly-effective pharmaceutical abortions are just as much killing as a partial-birth abortion. Tragically the visual difference between first trimester and third trimester babies will likely lead to countless unborn children continuing to die in silence, without the possibility of such provocative videos shared online to change minds.

Nor is it only pharmaceutical abortions that are at issue. There are a host of bioethical quandaries at hand right now, but the public has little-to-no understanding of these questions. This video may cause a cultural backlash against abortion in the later stages, and it should be praised for that, but we must have a deeper conversation about human dignity that centers on our definitions of life and moral duty. Sadly, in an age of increasing flexibility on ultimate questions, it is hard to imagine a new consensus taking shape. In the absence of that consensus, scientists, doctors, and individuals who find a child inconvenient will continue to do as they will. We make the Spartans’ practice of leaving unwanted babies to die of exposure look mild, but at least our modern atrocities are hidden in bathrooms and surgical rooms, right?

“The biggest myth about judges is that they’re somehow imbued with greater insight, wisdom, and vision than the rest of us; that for some reason God Almighty has endowed them with superior judgment about human fairness. But the truth is that judges are men and women with human imperfections and frailties. Some have been brilliant, principled and moral. Others have been mentally impaired, venal, and even racist.”

Mark Levin, Men in Black

Judicial activism occurs when judges depart from their constitutional role of interpreting law and make law from the bench. It’s a pernicious practice that undermines the democratic process, and it has been with us for a long time. American judicial history is filled with instances where judges usurped authority that did not belong to them and rewrote the law or constitutional provisions under consideration. Examples of cases involving judicial activism include Dred Scott v. Sandford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Korematsu v. United States and Roe v. Wade – to name just a few.

Article One of the United States Constitution vests the legislative authority of the government in the Congress. It is the province of elected legislators – not unelected judges – to make law. The framers of the Constitution were careful to separate the powers of government among three separate, co-equal branches. They did not intend for one branch of government to exercise powers belonging to the other branches. To the contrary, James Madison warned in the Federalist Papers that the concentration of all powers – legislative, executive, and judicial – in the same hands “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Which brings us to the most recent term of the United States Supreme Court.

The Court’s recent decisions on Obamacare and gay marriage are classic examples of judicial activism. In King v. Burwell, the court’s majority rewrote the Affordable Care Act in order to sustain it against a constitutional challenge. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the court’s majority discovered a fundamental right to homosexual marriage in the Constitution that had apparently gone overlooked for over 200 years – even though the document is silent on the subjects of marriage and homosexuality. These actions constitute judicial activism and they grossly undermine the democratic process.

In Obergefell, the Court effectively vetoed the laws or constitutions of states that had explicitly banned gay marriage, thereby overturning the will of the people and their elected representatives in almost half the country. Typically, the authority to “veto” a law is reposed in the executive branch of government. Hence, under the guise of interpreting the law and the Constitution, the Supreme Court rewrote both, thereby arrogating unto itself the powers of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Mr. Madison, Father of the Constitution, called that “tyranny.”

But, it’s more than that.

Justice Scalia called the Court’s actions in vetoing the laws of the states and declaring gay marriage a fundamental constitutional right a profound act of hubris, and went so far as to label it “judicial putsch” – an act of treason again the government. He went on to say, “A system of government that makes the People subordinate to nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy.” In the face of such hubris, Chief Justice Roberts asked, “Just who do we think we are?” He went on to say that, notwithstanding the inventiveness of the majority in Obergefell, the Constitution had nothing to do with the decision.

The implications of judicial activism go far beyond health care and gay marriage. These are but the latest symptoms of a growing problem, which is that judicial activism poses a grave threat to the foundations of our democratic republic. It elevates one branch of government over the other two and it erodes our right to representative government. In some instances the elected branches have acquiesced in the face of judicial activism because it relieved them of having to deal with “hot button issues,” which always carry the risk of alienating some constituencies. In others, they have affirmed the outcomes of decisions because they liked them but had been unable to muster the necessary majorities of both houses of Congress to effect the changes themselves. In still other cases, our elected officials have simply been too timid to take on the Court.

No matter their reasons for failing to challenge the court, the problem of judicial activism is that it short-circuits the democratic process. In a democracy, process is important; it’s not just about the end result. In a democracy, the ends don’t justify the means. How we get from Point A to Point B is critical: It’s the difference between democracy and tyranny. Even if tyrants sometime get it right, this doesn’t negate the injustice of their actions. Liberty always matters.

Freedom loving people all over America are upset about judicial overreach, not just the justices who were in the minority in these decisions. Several candidates for President are hyperventilating about the issue and are seeking to gain political capital with their over-heated rhetoric. But this is not the time for red meat. It is time for a thoughtful, well-reasoned discussion about the dangers of judicial activism and how best to combat it.

Presidents and members of Congress are not constitutional eunuchs who are impotent to resist judicial activism. The Constitution equips them with a system of checks and balances that can be applied to reign in those who engage in judicial overreach. Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln are examples of two Chief Executives who understood the dangers of judicial activism and who resisted it in their time. Where would America be today if Mr. Lincoln had rolled over in response to the Dred Scott decision?

Will the current crop of candidates have the chutzpah to grasp the nettle and deal with the issue? Will Congress? Amendments to the Constitution are not necessarily the solution – especially when activist judges have demonstrated a penchant for rewriting the document. So the question recurs: Will the candidates do more than just acknowledge the problem? Will they do more than raise their voices, wring their hands and get red in the face? Will they tell the American people how they intend to check and balance judges who usurp authority that does not belong to them? Will they tell us how they will use their executive powers to keep judicial activists at bay? Will they offer a prescription for how the Congress can use its power to diminish the power of judicial tyrants? Have they forgotten Alexander Hamilton’s observation in Federalist No. 78 that the judiciary has neither “force nor will, but merely judgment?”

In his first inaugural address Mr. Lincoln declared, “The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, …the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.” Those words are no less true today than they were in Lincoln’s time.

America needs a President who will exercise the full measure of his or her constitutional authority to reign in an errant judiciary. We need a President who will help restore representative government back to the people. The right to representative government is, after all, a legacy that has been bequeathed to us by the blood of patriots who resisted the tyrants of their day.

Is there an Abraham Lincoln among the current crop of contenders for the presidency?

Only time will tell.

]]>http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/reining-in-judicial-supremacists/feed/0An Exceptional Nation?http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/an-exceptional-nation/
http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/an-exceptional-nation/#commentsThu, 09 Jul 2015 13:43:02 +0000http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/?p=39528Another Independence Day has come and gone, and as always, the holiday elicited much waxing lyrical about the greatness of America. As one who leans to the conservative side of things, my Facebook feed was peppered with no shortage of odes to the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. While it’s not in my nature to be effusively patriotic, I am certainly grateful to be an American and do believe that we are in many ways an exceptional nation. It so happens that my husband and I started watching the HBO drama “Newsroom” over the weekend, something that prompted me to consider the idea of American exceptionalism in further detail. In the pilot episode, Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels) delivers a scathing critique of America as part of a panel discussion at Northwestern University. He’s asked why he believes that America is the greatest nation on earth, and responds as follows:

“And with a straight face you’re going to tell students that America is so star spangled awesome that we’re the only ones in the world that have freedom? Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, BELGIUM has freedom. So, 207 sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom.

“And you, sorority girl, just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day there’s somethings you should know. One of them is there’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, Number 4 in labor force and Number 4 in exports, we lead the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending where spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies.

“Now none of this is the fault of a 20 year old college student, but you none the less are without a doubt a member of the worst period generation period ever period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the f–k you’re talking about. Yosemite?

“It sure used to be. We stood up for what was right. We fought for moral reasons. We passed laws, struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were and we never beat our chests. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, acted like men, we aspired to intelligence, we didn’t belittle it, it didn’t make us feel inferior.

“We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election and we didn’t scare so easy. We were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed, by great men, men who were revered. First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore. Enough?”

This is nothing new, of course. Jeff Daniels’ character at least believes that America used to be the greatest nation on earth, while many on the Left are quite happy to say that they do not believe that America was ever a great nation, period. Our poor track record with regard to women and minorities is generally the reason, as well as capitalism and our history of military interventionism. On many college campuses, students emerge from their freshman history courses convinced that being American is something to be ashamed of.

But it’s not just Liberal professors indoctrinating their students on the evils of America. Increasingly, voices on the Right are chiming in to the “America’s Not Great” bandwagon. On the eve of Independence day, the outspoken Christian blogger Matt Walsh published a piece explaining his position that America is no longer a great nation:

“Happy Fourth of July. America is not great. Not anymore. America is a land where babies are murdered, the family is disintegrating, marriage is perverted, and every institution is dominated by nihilists and self-worshiping liberals. That’s America. It has betrayed God, and any true patriot should feel a deep and profound anger, not false confidence in our alleged greatness.

“I think it’s time, particularly after this past week, that those on the right stop with the blind, frivolous ‘optimism’ that leads us to constantly proclaim America’s ‘greatness’ no matter how corrupt and sinful our culture has become. There is an arrogance in that declaration that, I assure you, does no please God. I doubt very much that God looks down on our culture and agrees with our assertion that we’re still super great and awesome no matter what.”

So what is the average American to make of this? America is condemned from the Left as a socially and economically unjust police state, and condemned from the right as a morally bankrupt, hedonistic wasteland. Liberals tell us that we can be great again if we raise taxes on the rich, raise the minimum wage, outlaw guns, eradicate discrimination, and – somehow – ensure universal K-College public education and free health care for all. This is what a great nation looks like, generally speaking, to a Liberal. Matt Walsh, on the other hand, tells us that the key to the restoration of American greatness requires a national return to faith:

“In the end, the nation that sends the most people to heaven is the greatest. Period. No nation is truly great if it leads its citizens away from truth and away from God. It’s as simple as that. You find a country where most of the citizens — the culture itself, predominately — is directed toward God, toward a humble, moral life, toward truth, and you have found a great nation. I don’t care what else it has going for it. I don’t care if it the life expectancy is 27 and it doesn’t have a standing army or WiFi. If the conditions in the country are such that people are living a moral, God-centered life, it is a great country.”

Ironically, both “Newsroom’s” Will McAvoy and Matt Walsh point back to a time of American greatness, and seem to admire similar things. In an almost identical echo of McAvoy, Walsh says:

“[W]hile we’ve declined rapidly, we also rose faster than any country before us. We accomplished incredible things. We stormed beaches, conquered tyrants, built cities; we invented and pioneered and innovated. We faced down evil and defeated it. We abolished slavery. We established civil rights for all. We beat the Nazis. We extinguished Communism. We earned the title of a land of opportunity. A God-fearing land. We went to church, we raised our families, we worked, we loved, we prayed.”

There it is, the same references to America’s technological prowess, her character and bravery on the battlefield, her fierce sense of moral rectitude, and her reputation as a land of political equality and economic opportunity for all.

McAvoy is optimistic that America can regain her greatness, and his producer believes that America’s remaining virtue is the one that’s always been at the heart of her greatness: The belief that she could do better. Thus by Episode Two, the driving vision of the show is established: Will McAvoy will remind America of what she once was by serving as the unwavering “moral center” of his nightly news broadcast. He will remind the American people that they respect, and aspire to, intelligence, and are not mere consumers of flashy entertainment. There’s a sense that McAvoy holds the American people in contempt – contempt for their apathy and ignorance, contempt for their hollow patriotism.

Matt Walsh’s contempt for modern day America is much more palpable. It’s explicit. And while I share many of his concerns about America’s moral floundering and her embrace of moral therapeutic deism (combined, strangely enough, with an entirely material view of reality), I can’t help but find his prescription for a return to American greatness wanting. Of course, the goal for any believer should be to live with God at the center, and a nation populated by such people would truly hold the potential for greatness. But America managed to skyrocket to greatness without being an Christian nation. We had a Christian-influenced culture, to be sure, as did all western nations at the time, but we weren’t a “Christian nation” in the way that many Conservatives seem to believe. Our founding political documents and the institutions that grew out of them reflected a combination of Jerusalem and Athens – humility before God paired with a confidence that knowledge was accessible through the use of reason.

If anything, American greatness has fallen victim to one of her greatest virtues: freedom. We live in a society that venerates the freedom of thought and speech. We are a vast nation that has set the bar quite high for ourselves. Despite our immense size and our diversity, we cling to our ideals of liberty and justice for all. We strive mightily for it. The result of this struggle is perpetual instability, perpetual conflict, and inevitably, perpetual disappointment. One party’s victory is always interpreted as a setback by the other side. One side’s vision of justice is the other side’s definition of injustice. And the bigger America grows, the more diverse she becomes, the worse this problem will get. Politicians and pundits love to invoke “the people” as though they are ultimately in agreement on the important things, but the truth is that they aren’t. We are a nation of great and divergent passions;. Approximately half of us think it’s morally permissible for a woman to kill her unborn child, while the other half views it as an act of unspeakable evil. Half of us believe that marriage is defined solely by the love of the two people involved, while the other half views it as a holy sacrament established by God in Creation for a man and woman only. Some view justice as a 20-foot-high wall along our southern border, while others see amnesty as the solution most in keeping with the American spirit.

Bottom line, America is an exceptional nation. We are unique in the world. But exceptional doesn’t always mean great. I fear that in many ways we’ve become too big and too successful for true greatness. We’re… diluted, in a way. Some countries achieve national unity and harmony by suppressing diversity or limiting free speech. Others are very small and homogenous, and remain that way by adopting strict immigration laws. America does none of that. Despite how difficult it is, we continue to press towards the ideals expressed in our founding documents. We could go the way of Russia, and pummel our unruly and opinionated populace into submission with an iron fist, but then we would cease to be America. Perhaps this means that we’ll ultimately fall victim to the very thing that enabled our meteoric rise to greatness. Or perhaps, as has happened so many times throughout our history, we’ll manage to surprise ourselves. People, after all, have been writing about the decline of America since the ink on the Declaration of Independence was still wet.

“I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

These are the concluding sentiments of mass murderer and racial terrorist Dylan Roof, as expressed in his now infamous “manifesto.” This young man was clearly full of bitterness and anger at a nation that had, in his warped view, gone terribly wrong. His solution was to commit an act of brutality so jarring and so provocative that it would incite bitterness, anger, and violence in others. His ultimate goal? A race war.

In the face of such hatred, it’s almost inconceivable that the survivors of Roof’s rampage – in this case, the families of those slain – could react with anything but wrathful anger. The country certainly would have understood. But they didn’t. In the face of withering evil, the families offered forgiveness. To the man whose goal was to elicit violence, they offered a peace that passes all understanding.

This is what the Gospel in action looks like. Only through the power of God could such a response be possible. For all his Wikipedia “research” and his self-professed expertise in American history, Roof neglected to take into account the power of faith. You could see the creeping shame on his face as he listened to family member after family member express their forgiveness. All the power that Roof felt when he pulled the trigger, telling himself that he was executing a grand moral act on behalf of the white race, drained away and all that remained was a broken little man in leg irons.

Because of this response, America is experiencing a rare moment of unity, of reconciliation instead of estrangement and love instead of hate.

In America today, it’s easy to lose sight of the positive. An entire cottage industry has evolved within the media whose sole purpose is to stir up emotions and fan flames of controversy, and it’s a 24-hour a day job. But the families of Emanuel A.M.E. refused to let anyone else determine the narrative in this situation. Not the race baiters and grievance mongers, and certainly not Dylan Roof. Out of the ashes of their sorrow, beauty is emerging. People are coming together, reforms are being accomplished, and transformation is occurring.

For anyone that doubts it, be assured: The Gospel still has power to transform lives. Christ embodied the ultimate example of love, forgiveness, and grace; and the people of Charleston are modeling his teachings. The rest of the nation would do well to learn from their example.

]]>http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/faith-in-action/feed/0Something to Teach Your Kidshttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org/something-to-teach-your-kids/
http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/something-to-teach-your-kids/#commentsWed, 24 Jun 2015 04:11:44 +0000http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/?p=39519It’s a Hallmark holiday, but Father’s Day can be a chance to reflect a bit on our children and their future. As a father of one son (and soon to be two), I am a member of a shrinking subset in modern America. Increasingly, many people like me aren’t getting married, some aren’t having children at all, and many of those who do eventually marry and have children are doing so much later in life. There are many reasons for these trends, but one ideological reason stands out: we millennials seem to be embracing a complete redefinition of both our families and ourselves around the concept of Identity. I fear this will present great challenges for my generation’s children.

It seems that one of the most significant cultural themes my children will encounter is Identity. I’m not talking about concrete, observable identity (their height, place of birth, hair color). No, I mean felt or discovered identity. My children will be told that they need to look into themselves for meaning. To figure out who they are, and to make that self-discovered “identity” the source of meaning for their lives. Morality, truth, faith, duty, family, community – these all take a backseat to identity in our culture today. And, once this identity is “discovered” and claimed, nothing must stand in the way of the full actualization and embrace of that identity.

This is the inevitable result of the kind of postmodernism that has been at work on my generation since childbirth. Through the pangs of attempting to create a livable moral construct, postmodernism has given birth to Identity as our new touchstone. “Who you are” has become the only real absolute truth. All actions, feelings, and choices that flow out from this “identity” are de facto true, good, and unassailable. Sadly, this is not a new development – it’s simply another manifestation of the root of evil, pride. Augustine explained this perfectly:

“Pride is the beginning of sin. And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation – when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself.”

So what can I do to guide my children in the face of this pressure to be self-defined? I believe our only hope for the next generation is to steer our children away from this obsession with identity and toward faith, duty, and love.

Faith is the key, for through faith we give up our identity and hold to the absolute Truth and Grace that come through Christ. Per Augustine, we will either exalt ourselves or God – there is no other option. Identity exalts the self, but faith exalts God and works for the good of our neighbor. Identity says we must work for our own glory and self-realization. Faith says we must turn away from ourselves and our sin and embrace the Truth.

Connected to faith, moral duty is an immensely important concept for us to teach our children. It is quickly slipping away in our culture. Our sense of duty has diminished under the weight of our concept of “rights.” One of the greatest philosophical missteps of our country’s Founding era was the enshrinement of the language of “rights” absent “duties”. To speak of rights first is to talk backwards. In America today we say that we have a right to life, and therefore no one should be permitted to murder. In reality, we have a duty to protect life, and it is only from that shared duty that we can come up with an idea of a right to life. The trouble with rights-speak is that it is so abstract that we have begun to create rights from thin air whenever we feel the need. Rights today are vague felt concepts, similar to our vague fumbling around to define and express our own identities. And they emphasize the individual as an independent right-holder standing apart from society, as opposed to a member of society who has duties to those around him as an unavoidable consequence of that membership.

Speaking in terms of moral duties bypasses the murky quagmire of rights. We must teach our children their duties to protect the lives and properties of others, to work for the good of their neighbors, to care for their families, to sacrifice themselves. Focusing on duties gives them (and us) something to do. Most importantly, it directs us outward. Duty tells us what we ought to do for other people, not what we ought to claim for ourselves. The impact duty has on the mind of a child is clear. Children are born largely selfish. They must be taught duty and self-sacrifice. In contrast, our culture today would keep us all selfish children. Perhaps it is not surprising that my generation is less eager to procreate – having children may be too grown-up for us.

While duty can be taught, it will only be realized through love. Real love. The kind of love that is a verb, that involves self-sacrifice, that is obtainable only as it participates in the love of Christ in His ultimate sacrifice of himself for humanity. It is a great sadness to see how love has come to be defined today. Like every other modern “virtue”, it is defined by the individual. Modern “love” is a feeling or personal decision. It is defined by self. But true love is defined by its selflessness.

If our children can learn and accept faith, duty, and love, perhaps they can grow into mature adults despite a culture that wants them to remain children. This is our great task as fathers, and it is made more difficult by the trends of our culture. But the culture is not to be feared. It does no good to hide children from a warped culture in the long term. They will need to deal with the ideas at work in our culture sooner or later. Rather than shielding them, we must show them the richness, beauty, and meaning in a life characterized by faith, duty, and love, and a hope for eternity that goes beyond the demands of the now.

]]>http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/something-to-teach-your-kids/feed/0United We Standhttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org/united-we-stand/
http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/united-we-stand/#commentsWed, 17 Jun 2015 04:01:57 +0000http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/?p=39516Survey after survey shows that Americans are more disillusioned with politics than ever before. They don’t trust that their representatives truly have their interests or the welfare of the nation at heart, but instead their own ambitions. How long has it been since anyone could say with confidence that the person representing them in Congress or in the White House was a grounded, authentic, principled, forthright, honest person? These days, there’s always an angle, and the tone is always divisive. The entire contemporary political apparatus is built around the exploitation of identity politics and “wedge issues.” Politicians, and the political machines responsible for manufacturing and “running” them as candidates, identify our differences, zero in on those differences, and make their campaign appeals based on those differences. The result? A polarized electorate that increasingly sees politics as a zero-sum process.

According to the prevailing political narrative, the “electorate” exists as a loose collection of identity-based sub-groups including factors like ideology, race, religion, morality, age, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status and many others. Pitting these groups against one another, or making them think that the other groups are somehow responsible for their grievances, is an excellent way to build a secure political constituency: “Vote for me! I’ll fight for you against the corruption and undue influence of X, Y, and Z!” “X, Y, and Z are ruining this country, vote for me and we’ll take America back, together!”

We’ve all heard it. The rhetoric of fear and division. Animosity and paranoia are great motivators. They get people to the polls and keep them voting the way they should.

It’s been this way for so long that the American people have lost sight of an important truth: We actually share far more in common than we realize. At the end of the day, most people want the same things out of life. They want to feel safe. They want the freedom to pursue their dreams. They want to be able to provide for their families. They want to leave a positive legacy for their children and grandchildren. The endless harping on our divisions has caused us to lose sight of these common goods. It inhibits us from all putting on the harness an pulling in the same direction.

America faces huge challenges at home and abroad. At home we face a staggering debt that threatens to choke out the American Dream. Race relations are worse than they’ve been in decades. Distrust has grown between the police and the communities they serve. A perceived gulf continues to grow between “Main Street” and “Wall Street,” fanning the flames of class warfare. Abroad, we face an enemy intent on destroying our freedoms, our way of life, and our lives. Our reputation as the leader of the free world has fallen into doubt. It will be hard to recover from these domestic and international problems if people continue to be distracted by politically-inspired infighting. We all have a stake in the preservation of our freedoms and our way of life, and if we don’t stand together we will fall separately.

Our forefathers recognized the importance of a national union. We are the UNITED States of America. Our founding documents emphasized the need for unity and the common good. We must reclaim that spirit of unity, and to do that we need leaders who are more interested in uniting us than dividing us. As the run-up to Election 2016 slowly kicks into gear, we’ll be hearing a lot from the ever-growing field of candidates vying for our support. Voters will do well to pay close attention to the rhetorical strategies employed by each one. Do they appeal to our narrow interests at the expense of a greater vision? Do their comments unite or divide, produce unity or polarization?

Ecclesisates 4:12 tells us that “A cord of three strands is not quickly broken,” while Mark 3:25 cautions that a house divided against itself cannot stand. America is the most dynamic, diverse, and powerful nation in the history of mankind. There is nothing we cannot do when we put our collective mind and will to a challenge. But it is folly to think that we are too big or too powerful to fall. If we cherish the blessings that come with being American, then we must be willing to band together for the common purpose of protecting and preserving those blessings. This should be our highest national priority.

We need leaders who will unite us, not divide us; who will point us to the common good, who remind us of what we share in common, not of what our differences are. In unity there is strength and hope for the future. In division, there is nothing but chaos and disintegration. We have a choice to make. Which path will we choose?

]]>http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/united-we-stand/feed/0I Am Not Pamela Gellerhttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org/i-am-not-pamela-geller/
http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/i-am-not-pamela-geller/#commentsWed, 10 Jun 2015 03:48:49 +0000http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/?p=39513In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, New York Times columnist David Brooks penned an article entitled “I Am Not Charlie Hebdo.” The article was a response to the popular “Je Suis Charlie Hebdo” tag that exploded across social media in the days and weeks following the attack, which left 12 people dead and Paris reeling. Brooks began his piece by pointing out that many people claiming solidarity with Charlie Hebdo are in fact quite hostile to the kind of politically incorrect, intentionally offensive language and subject matter the magazine was infamous for:

“The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down. . . .

“Just look at all the people who have overreacted to campus micro-aggressions. The University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality. The University of Kansas suspended a professor for writing a harsh tweet against the N.R.A. Vanderbilt University derecognized a Christian group that insisted that it be led by Christians.

“Americans may laud Charlie Hebdo for being brave enough to publish cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, but, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali is invited to campus, there are often calls to deny her a podium.”

The disconnect here is truly baffling. One wonders if the sympathy for Charlie Hebdo has more to do with its sexy image – French, far-left, anti-establishment – than the actual content of its magazine. At any rate, Brooks acknowledges that the kind of satire promoted by Charlie Hebdo and other media iconoclasts is part and parcel of living in a free society. As offensive as they are, we must make space for them in the public conversation or risk weakening the legal and philosophical structures upon which all our liberties rest. He also acknowledges, however, that satirists and provocateurs don’t command the same level of respect or attention as more thoughtful social commentators and critics:

“In most societies, there’s the adults’ table and there’s the kids’ table. The people who read Le Monde or the establishment organs are at the adults’ table. The jesters, the holy fools and people like Ann Coulter and Bill Maher are at the kids’ table. They’re not granted complete respectability, but they are heard because in their unguided missile manner, they sometimes say necessary things that no one else is saying.

“Healthy societies, in other words, don’t suppress speech, but they do grant different standing to different sorts of people. Wise and considerate scholars are heard with high respect. Satirists are heard with bemused semirespect. Racists and anti-Semites are heard through a filter of opprobrium and disrespect. People who want to be heard attentively have to earn it through their conduct.”

Indeed, one can’t make a habit out of knocking down sacred cows, jabbing thumbs in proverbial eyes, and otherwise dumping all over the things that people hold dear and expect a charitable hearing. Which brings me to the subject of this writing: Pamela Geller.

Ms. Geller has made a latter-day career out of her crusade against the influence of political Islam and jihadism in America. Author and operator of the blog “Atlas Shrugs,” and co-founder of the organization “Stop Islamization of America,” she drew national attention for her opposition to the now infamous “Ground Zero Mosque” project. More recently, she made headlines after her “Draw the Prophet” contest at a community center in Garland, TX. As expected, the event provoked a violent response. Two assailants opened fire outside the event and were killed, but not before injuring a security guard. Subsequently, a plot to behead Geller for her blasphemy against the Prophet was thwarted when the suspect attacked Boston police officers and was killed.

Right leaning media has wasted no time in holding up Ms. Geller as a champion of the First Amendment and fearless truth-sayer. While the mainstream media would prefer to “submit” and “kowtow,” Ms. Geller is willing to risk her life and her reputation in the service of truth, liberty, and the American way. Is there truth in what Ms. Geller says? Sure. Are her critiques of political Islam and its ultimate incompatibility with secular liberalism and a pluralistic society generally accurate? Yes. However, as David Brooks pointed out, how a person presents their perspective in large part determines the efficacy of their message and the attitude in which it is received.

Ms. Geller’s association with all that is shrill, offensive, irreverent, and puerile on the far Right end of the political spectrum automatically discounts her from full participation in the public discussion of Islam’s place in a free society. Speaking as someone who has very recently written my own article criticizing Islam, I can sympathize with her anger in the face of what appears to be a compliant media, a delusional progressive elite, and a disingenuous Administration on the subject of combating the influence of political Islam in America. Her style only appeals to a small minority of the public, however. The only people nodding their heads and pumping their fists in agreement with what she says are people who are already card-carrying members of the Far Right – the kind of people that only listen to talk radio and forward the latest Obama Birther conspiracy theory to everyone on their contact list. Most other people, even those who might be sympathetic to her cause, are so put off by her caustic tone and her apparent desire to be as offensive as possible in the name of “truth” that they don’t take her seriously. This only plays into the hands of organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, organizations that are more than happy to brand Geller and her ilk as nothing more than a band of bigoted xenophobes that must be silenced in the name of tolerance and civility.

Most everyone knows or has known someone in their lives who justifies everything they say with the defense that they are “just being honest.” No matter how rude or tactless or tone-deaf or even cruel, to these kind of people it’s all permissible in the name of “truth.” This is the defense that Pam Geller offers when her tactics are challenged. Confronted with the accusation that her cartoon contest was a crude and provocative publicity stunt, she doubled down. She wasn’t be provocative and needlessly offensive, she was “standing up.” She was “refusing to kowtow.” Undoubtedly, a person of her convictions would consider the notion of tempering her message or modifying her strategy as a betrayal of principles and a concession to the enemy, but sometimes a bit of finesse is necessary if one truly wants their message to be given a fair hearing.

Ms. Geller can, by all means, continue haggling with liberal reporters and grandstanding for the likes of Sean Hannity or the folks at The Blaze, if that’s what makes her feel good. So long as she realizes that she’s doing far more harm to her cause than good. If Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a hard time getting her message to permeate the fog of delusion surrounding the rising threat of radical Islam, you can be sure that next to no one is paying attention to what Pam Geller has to say on the subject.

]]>http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/i-am-not-pamela-geller/feed/0The Right Side of Historyhttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org/the-right-side-of-history/
http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/the-right-side-of-history/#commentsWed, 03 Jun 2015 21:29:33 +0000http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/?p=39507If any two issues illustrate the awesome power of public relations campaigns to define important cultural and policy debates, they are abortion and gay marriage. By cleverly framing these highly controversial questions in terms of human rights and social “progress,” advocates have cultivated a social environment in which opposition to either makes you a bigot and/or a misogynist. So effective has this strategy been that those who might privately subscribe to orthodox views about the sanctity of human life or the constituency of marriage cannot say so out loud for fear of appearing intolerant. Young people, in particular, want to feel like they are in sync with the ideological tides of their generation. They want to stand on the “right side of history.” It’s not simply that they want others to view them this way, they want to view themselves this way.

This phenomenon may explain the results of a recent Gallup poll showing that a decisive majority of the American public are pro-life – they just don’t realize it. On the surface, the latest survey of public opinion on abortion indicates that the pro-choice position is gaining ground:

“The Gallup survey found that half of Americans identify themselves as ‘pro-choice’ on abortion, surpassing the 44% who identify as “pro-life.” Gallup says ‘This is the first time since 2008 that the pro-choice position has had a statistically significant lead in Americans’ abortion views.'”

A closer look at the data, however, reveals that some who describe themselves as “pro-choice” actually oppose abortion in all but the rarest of circumstances:

“When asked when abortion should be legal, 55 percent of Americans oppose all abortions or say abortion should only be legal in a ‘few circumstances,’ typically defined as cases such as rape, incest or if the life of the mother is in danger. Since those cases constitute, at most, 1-2 percent of all abortion cases, Gallup’s numbers confirm 55 percent of Americans oppose 98 percent or more of the 1.1 million abortions that take place annually in the United States.”

This is encouraging news. Whether or not people recognize it or admit it, the pro-life position has majority sentiment on it’s side. Advocates for life should take this news as a challenge. We need to revolutionize the way we talk about abortion so that people can say out loud and with their heads held high that they oppose the voluntary killing of unborn infants. Defending the defenseless shouldn’t be a cause for shame, it should be the obvious conclusion of every moral, rational, responsible person in a free society.

How did we get to this point? Quite simply, ours is a society that worships at the altar of individualism. Once a hallmark of the rugged American character that built this nation, individualism has come to mean “prohibition from any and all moral judgments regarding the choices and activities of others.” There was a time when most people recognized – whether or not they were able to articulate it – their contingency as created beings. They believed that they had duties, both to God as their divine creator, and to their fellow man. Ontology mattered. In other words, vocations carried with them duties, duties which a person of character did not neglect or ignore. To be a husband or a wife meant something particular, as did the vocation of father and mother, son or daughter. Fulfillment of these ontological vocations were held to be more important than individual feelings or desires. As a member of the human community, it was understood and expected that people bind themselves to these duties. Shirkers were shunned, sometimes even punished, for ignoring this.

Today, all a mother needs to say in defense of her choice to kill her child is “my body, my choice.” Motherhood, that once revered office, has been reduced to a mood. One either “feels it” or she doesn’t. And no one is permitted to judge. All this under the aegis of “privacy rights” and those misty constitutional “penumbras and emanations” that apparently sanction the killing of innocent unborn children in the name of liberty.

Nevermind that most people know IN THEIR GUT that abortion is wrong. Most people recognize that killing a baby merely because he or she wasn’t planned and isn’t wanted is a heinous excuse for killing a baby. Every time we as a society ooh and ahh over the birth of a child, be it the latest Royal Baby, Hillary Clinton’s granddaughter, or Beyonce’s Blue Ivy, we are tacitly acknowledging that the arrival of a new person on this earth is a universal cause for celebration. Children are, indeed, a blessing. They are innocent of their conception. They didn’t choose to be conceived, and they bear no responsibility for the inconvenience posed to the mother. They are just children – needful, precious creatures that must rely on the grace and love of their mother and other caregivers for the very air they breathe. This holds true whether or not they were the result of meticulously orchestrated conception efforts or the result of a drunken one-night-stand.

Those of us who have the opportunity to speak out or act in support of life must redouble our efforts to make the case for life. With earnestness, honesty, and respect, we must persist in our message that every member of the human family is worthy of our respect and protection under the law. Yes, human beings are endowed with unalienable rights, but we are also charged with profound responsibilities. We are responsible for caring for the least among us. We are bound by blood to care for and support our kin, including our unborn children. Fulfilling these human duties is fundamental to our membership in the family of man, and we eschew these truths at the cost of our souls and the health of our society.

A majority of the American people already know all this, but they have been so long cowed and intimidated by the rhetoric of “choice” that they doubt the rectitude of their moral compass. They just need someone to remind them that it is they, and not the pro-choice cohort, who are standing on the right side of history.

]]>http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/the-right-side-of-history/feed/0How to Not Be Depressed About National Newshttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org/how-to-not-be-depressed-about-national-news/
http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/how-to-not-be-depressed-about-national-news/#commentsWed, 03 Jun 2015 18:41:55 +0000http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/?p=39499A review of “Restoring All Things.”

John Stonestreet and Warren Cole Smith, “Restoring All Things: God’s Audacious Plan to Change the World Through Everyday People” (Baker Books, 2015).

On the opening page of John Stonestreet and Warren Cole Smith’s new book, the authors include an excerpt from an Andrew Peterson song:

When the world is new again
And the children of the King
Are ancient in their youth again
Maybe it’s a better thing
A better thing…

To be more than merely innocent
But to be broken then redeemed by love
Maybe this old world is bent
But it’s waking up
And I’m waking up.

Forget the corny subtitle of the book. Stonestreet and Smith have done the Church a service with this book, and these lyrics set the tone perfectly.

That’s because, unlike so much else that’s out there, this isn’t a book for people who are looking for justification for their apocalyptic narratives about the way the country is going. If you like to sit at home, guzzling depressing stories about massive national trends you can do nothing about, this isn’t your book. And if you prefer to meet political, religious, and social problems with passivity, waiting for Ronald Reagan to reincarnate and solve those problems, this book will make you deeply uncomfortable.

Neither, though, is it a book with a dreamy message about how you can change the world with the latest flavor of the month evangelical fix.

This is a book for people who are yearning for hope that evils we can see around us are not unstoppable. Who can see that it’s harder and harder to affect the world around us, as that world gets bigger and bigger through Mass Everything and technology…but who wish they could meet that reality with action instead of hand-wringing. Restoring All Things is a book for people who want to take the problems of the family, the community, the church, and pitch in with both hands to help make something better.

That’s because it’s a book that is filled almost entirely with stories of people who, usually on a human scale, are doing exactly that.

Using stories of real people, groups, nonprofits, and churches, the authors document the lives or work of Christians whose choices are changing lives and communities—in areas like helping the poor, rescuing women and girls from human trafficking, loving God with your mind in intolerant intellectual climates, navigating the complexities of changing ideas about human sexuality, building a substantively different generation of leaders, rebuilding the arts, and more. (Yes, they mention the John Jay Institute.)

Read the wrong way, the book is a good recipe for guilt that you haven’t sold all your worldly possessions and started a crisis pregnancy center by age 18. But read the right way, it is a reminder that the world isn’t going to hell in a handbasket. People whose stories aren’t infuriating enough to make national news are doing wonderful things—often in creative ways normal people could emulate. Read the right way, Restoring All Things is an eye-opener for people who want inspiration for how their everyday vocations could be a part of God’s work. The Church needs to see a lot more content like this book.

]]>http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/how-to-not-be-depressed-about-national-news/feed/0Trigger Nationhttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org/trigger-nation/
http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/trigger-nation/#commentsWed, 27 May 2015 03:15:33 +0000http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/?p=39494Young students obsessed with “triggers” and safety need to take time for some serious self-reflection, writes Peggy Noonan in a witty and slightly-acerbic Wall Street Journal column. Noonan breaks down this call for caution, sensitivity, comfort, and safety in America’s college classrooms. She tells young people they are requiring too much of others and that they need to toughen up or consider therapy. Noonan’s overall point is sound, and it certainly applies to many of the young people who are quick to define their essence by their victim status, but I fear her message will be lost completely on the crowd she is criticizing. She does not delve into the root problem: Most young people feel that by protecting others in this way they are doing a great moral and social good.

It does not take many trips to Tumblr or Facebook to pick up on a pattern. Countless young people rush in to call foul on any hint of judgment or criticism directed against their select group of protected categories (this group of categories is constantly changing – the cataloging of it is beyond the scope of this article). Beyond attacking personal criticism, they also seek to ban any content that might cause harm, pain, or discomfort, especially if it’s not accompanied by a slew of caveats. Noonan shows this clear pattern through her examples of traditional college texts that students are ready to kick to the curb because they might make some of their classmates uncomfortable.

This impulse to clamp down on free speech seems to have come out of nowhere. How Un-American! Haven’t they read the Bill of Rights? Unfortunately, this impulse is rooted in their core moral outlook. They have been taught for years in schools, by the media, and by so many liberal churches, that the greatest moral goods are inclusiveness, diversity, acceptance, and ensuring that all people can discover and live out their own identities. Consequently, the greatest evils are judgment, criticism, and any content, belief, or opinion that will make someone feel imposed upon.

It is no surprise to see where these beliefs are leading so many young people. Given their presuppositions, it is perfectly rational and consistent for them to hold safety and comfort in higher esteem than free speech, the search for transcendent truth, and the freedom to make moral judgments.

They have no other moral rubric. They are largely unchurched and unaffiliated. Schools have taught no other code than inclusiveness and diversity. The American family is continually disintegrating, so they aren’t getting a consistent moral message from their parents. And churches are too busy trying desperately to gain members to have the time or faith to preach the Truth of the Gospel message.

Yet all people, and perhaps young people most of all, yearn for a moral cause to champion, a set of principles to fight for, and people to defend. Our young people have encountered few troubles in modern life. They have grown up largely able to think and say what they will. Most do not go hungry. Most do not face a major threat to life or liberty. So what great evil or challenge do they have to fight?

The “evil” they most frequently encounter, quite simply, is “meanness”. This meanness may be real or perceived, but it is their most common conflict. You can see their reaction in the rise of the anti-bullying movement. You can see it in the attempts to suppress moral judgments from conservative Christians or other religious groups. You can see it in the language of safety, acceptance, and trigger warnings.

And it’s not 100% absurd. The Internet has given rise to perhaps the most omnipresent meanness in Western social discourse in generations, and it’s being delivered directly into the phones and laptops of our youngest people. There are millions of legitimately awful, offensive, mean people online, reveling in the bile they seem constantly ready to spill upon any available social media post, forum, or comments section. Social meanness really is a legitimate evil to be fought, but it should not be a defining evil, or the highest evil. Without broader moral context, young people overreact to meanness.

Noonan is right to point out the absurdity of silencing offensive material in the context of higher education, but there is a hopeful tone in her piece, perhaps hinting that these young people might wise up if they just stepped back and recognized their needless victimhood. Sadly, I think the thought pattern is too ingrained to hope for a near-term solution. At best we might see a moderation as they leave college for the workplace, but don’t count on it.

More likely we will see the progression of silencing as these young people become more active players in politics and society at large. Think things are looking scary for religious minorities now? Wait until offensiveness, labeled bigotry, hate speech, or triggering, becomes an actual common crime.

These problems won’t be solved through young people growing up or toughening up. The younger generation needs a new moral rubric. They will learn eventually, but it may take the complete implosion of their unworkable, stifling, depressing institutions before they reconsider their assumptions. I’m not optimistic that they will abandon them before they destroy free speech and free religion as we know it.

]]>http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/trigger-nation/feed/0The Future of Freedom Hinges on Faithhttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org/the-future-of-freedom-hinges-on-faith/
http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/the-future-of-freedom-hinges-on-faith/#commentsTue, 26 May 2015 04:19:01 +0000http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/?p=39491In a May 2014 article entitled, “Can Christianity in the West Endure?” I expressed concerns about the fate of the Christian faith under the stewardship of current and future generations of western believers. I concluded thusly:

“But for Christians lucky enough to live in the free West, we have in large part become complacent and apathetic. Our embrace of relativism and our addiction to material things, coupled with our self-obsession, has dulled our sense of the Transcendent and diminished our faith. We take our freedom and our God for granted. What will it take to rekindle the vision of Christian martyrs past? Would even the rise of a modern day Bloody Mary be enough to shake us from our stupor, or have we reached that fatal point where perpetual diversion and comfort are more important to us than truth? If this is the case, then the Christian heritage preserved in the cathedrals, monuments, and universities of England and Europe may be all that will endure of Christianity in the West.”

A recent report from the Pew Research Center confirms my fears. Entitled, The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050: Why Muslims Are Rising Fastest and the Unaffiliated Are Shrinking as a Share of the World’s Population, the report forecasts the following:

Over the next four decades, Christians will remain the largest religious group, but Islam will grow faster than any other major religion. If current trends continue, by 2050 …

-The number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world.
-Atheists, agnostics and other people who do not affiliate with any religion – though increasing in countries such as the United States and France – will make up a declining share of the world’s total population.
-The global Buddhist population will be about the same size it was in 2010, while the Hindu and Jewish populations will be larger than they are today.
-In Europe, Muslims will make up 10% of the overall population.
-India will retain a Hindu majority but also will have the largest Muslim population of any country in the world, surpassing Indonesia.
-In the United States, Christians will decline from more than three-quarters of the population in 2010 to two-thirds in 2050, and Judaism will no longer be the largest non-Christian religion. Muslims will be more numerous in the U.S. than people who identify as Jewish on the basis of religion.

If Pew’s predictions are correct, then the implications of changing global religious trends do not paint an optimistic picture for the future of freedom around the world. You see, religious ideas do not just deal with views about the future of our souls, they also deal with how we view our fellow man. And how we view our fellow man determines how we treat him and how we order ourselves within society. It has long been observed by historians of western civilization that the modern conceptions of human rights, dignity, and liberty derive in large part from principles expressed through the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. If this is true (and I would maintain that it is), then the waning of these faith influences around the world is something that should worry everyone, even the notorious “nones.”

The American founding and the socio-political tradition that grew out of it provides a good example of the Judeo-Christian ethic’s significance as a foundation of modern liberalism. The American Republic was forged our of a moral and theological consensus that included the following: 1) There is a God who transcends human history and to whom human beings will ultimately give an account. 2) Human beings are created in the image of God and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, including the rights to life and liberty. 3) Even though we are fallen in our nature, our essential human dignity is undiminished and each human being is worthy of respect and the protection of the law. 4) Governments are instituted among men to secure mankind’s God-given rights.

These principles guided our Founders in their crafting of our government and the rights accorded to its citizens (See e.g., Christianity and the Constitution, by John Eidsmoe). Consequently, America has almost from the moment of her founding enjoyed a global reputation as a bastion of freedom in a world too-often dominated by tyrants. To understand why, all you have to do is ask and answer a few simple questions: 1) What measure of legal protection should be accorded to a human being created in the image of God? 2) Is one’s essential human dignity affected by race, creed, gender, age, or state of health? 3) Should government have the right to dictate the manner in which God’s creatures worship their Creator, if at all? 4) What right does the majority have to infringe on the rights of the minority, if both groups share equally in legal standing before the law and in the eyes of God? 5) What limits ought to be placed on government from infringing upon the rights of its citizens? 6)What limits ought to be imposed on the powers exercised by government, an enterprise populated with people who are no less fallen in their nature than those over whom they rule, but who are vested with the power of the sword and the purse?

The answers to these questions were self-evident to our Founding Fathers. They were codified in our Founding documents and have resulted in the tremendous freedom that Americans enjoy, a freedom that to this day remains the envy of the world.

But what happens to liberty when the prevailing views of the people in a society change, when the majority of members of a society buy into the notion that God is a creature of our imagination, a fairy story designed to assuage our fear of death? What is left to secure liberty when the prevailing view is that human beings are merely chance products of biological change over time, that there is no self-evident basis for essential human dignity, and that rights flow from Government rather than God? What is left to protect the most vulnerable among us when more and more of us subscribe to a utilitarian ethic that gauges human worth in terms of what we produce in comparison to how much we consume?

Here again, we can forecast the implications of such ideas by asking and answering a few simple questions: 1) Can there be a rational basis for human dignity in a universe governed by chance? 2) On what basis can a person lay claim to inherent rights or dignity in the face of government persecution or overreach? 3) On what basis can a person who is a member of a minority claim to have a right to resist the will of the majority? 4) On what basis can a person who becomes injured or debilitated lay claim to the resources of the public treasury or that of their fellow men?

Sadly, the answers are self-evident and the implications for the future of freedom are significant.

A troubling antecedent to the waning of Christianity and Judaism’s influence around the world is the trend projecting the rise of Islam. Comedian and pop-commentator (and strident atheist) Bill Maher recently noted in an interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose, Islam is not merely another religion. It is a faith that not only condones but actively prescribes violence, brutality, and oppression:

“Vast numbers of Christians do not believe that if you leave the Christian religion you should be killed for it. Vast numbers of Christians do not treat women as second class citizens. Vast numbers of Christians do not believe if you draw a picture of Jesus Christ you should get killed for it. So yes, does ISIS do Khmer Rouge-like activities where they just kill people indiscriminately who aren’t just like them? Yes. And would most Muslim people in the world do that or condone that? No. But most Muslim people in the world do condone violence just for what you think. . . . There was a Pew poll in Egypt done a few years ago – 82% said, I think, stoning is the appropriate punishment for adultery. Over 80% thought death was the appropriate punishment for leaving the Muslim religion. I’m sure you know these things. . . . So to claim that this religion is like other religions is just naive and plain wrong. It is not like other religions. The New York Times pointed out in an op-ed a couple weeks ago that in Saudi Arabia just since August 4th, they think it was, they have beheaded 19 people. Most for non-violent crimes including homosexuality.”

Again, ideas have consequences. What we believe determines how we behave, how we relate to one another and how we govern ourselves. The world is currently witnessing how those who follow the Prophet Mohammed relate to one another and how they govern themselves: The Middle East is burning and innocent people are being brutalized, tortured, and murdered by the thousands. Unless there is a mass change of heart and a shift of focus from the self to the soul, our children and grandchildren will pay a price for our growing apathy and indifference.

]]>http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/the-future-of-freedom-hinges-on-faith/feed/0Whatever the Costhttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org/whatever-the-cost/
http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/whatever-the-cost/#commentsFri, 08 May 2015 16:27:53 +0000http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/?p=39486A year ago, I wrote an article challenging the American Church to do more in the face of religious persecution of our Christian brethren abroad. At that time, the kidnapping of 276 young school girls by the Islamist group Boko Haram had captured the world’s attention. I wrote the following:

“That so many Christians in these countries feel forgotten and forsaken by the western church is a shameful testament to the attitude of complacency and apathy that has infected the hearts and minds of American Christians. We should be outraged and horrified by the treatment our fellow believers suffer and we should use every tool at our disposal to counteract it. After all, we are talking about family here, the family of Christ. We are called to be His hands and feet, and called to care for the poor, vulnerable, and needy. This means we must widen our gaze beyond the narrow scope of our own problems and pay some attention to what’s happening to Christians around the world. There will come a day when each and every one of us will have to give and account for our actions, or lack of action, in this life.”

A year later, the plight of Christians around the world has only worsened, particularly in the Middle East. The rise of ISIS has resulted in the systematic targeting, persecution, and slaughter of Christians in Iraq, Syria, and beyond. Archbishop Jean-Clément Jeanbart, head of the Melkite Greek Catholic Archparchy of Aleppo, recently visited the United States, where he spoke about the struggle of Syrian Christians in the face of ongoing persecution. It’s a struggle, he tells us, for survival itself:

“Before the war we were around 170,000. We don’t have reliable statistics today, but we may be around 100,000, maybe less. Most [who have left] aren’t very far away, in the southern part of the country or in Lebanon. On the other hand, some have gone to Europe, Canada, the United States, Australia, Sweden, and so on. We worry about these people, because we’re not sure they’ll ever come back.

“After what happened on Easter, people don’t know what to do. They’re afraid we’ll have the same scenario as Mosul. (Mosul is an Iraqi city under ISIS domination where virtually all Christians have been driven out, and where militants destroyed Christian gravesites over Easter in an effort to eradicate remaining symbols of the faith.)

“[I] feel responsible for the survival of a Church founded by the apostles themselves. The first Christians in Syria were baptized the day of the Pentecost in Jerusalem, by Peter and the other apostles. … They spread all over the region and founded the Church. The Lord gave me this responsibility in Syria, and I cannot simply accept that during my mandate, the Christians disappear. I’ll never stop fighting so they can hold on.”

We’ve all seen the gruesome images by now: Merciless executioners poised over the bowed heads of their Christian victims, grandstanding before a global audience, preaching their poisonous gospel of jihad as the blood of their victims spills onto the earth. While these images are shocking and vile, such persecution should come as no surprise. The Scriptures warn of such. The first disciples knew that living out the Great Commission would come at a great price. Martyrdom was routine in the early days, as Christianity’s message clashed with the principalities and powers of the day. For modern Western Christians, such persecution is difficult to imagine, and the notion of dying for one’s beliefs seems like something from ancient history. For millions of Christians, however, the prospect of martyrdom remains a daily reality, a reality that the world can no longer ignore thanks to the brutal and highly publicized tactics of ISIS.

I’ve said it before and it bears repeating: Christians all over the world have a duty to come to the aid of their brothers and sisters who are suffering. Burying our heads in the sand is not an option. If we are truly all members of one body in Christ, then the suffering of one becomes the suffering of all. When we ignore the problem and fail to act, we are effectively aiding and abetting the persecutors.

Like it or not, we are engaged in a religious war. The motives for the terror worldwide are rooted in religious views. Many of us see the ISIS henchmen as criminal madmen, but they see themselves as soldiers of Allah on a divine mission to exterminate the infidels and establish a religious caliphate. Their ideology leaves no room for religious liberty, consigns women to second-class status, and sees the state as a tool of Islam – empowered to wield the power of the sword in furtherance of the Koran’s teachings.

Whether this view is a perversion of Islam is not the point. A majority of Muslims may well be peace loving and respectful of secular laws and liberties, but this is irrelevant. What matters is that an increasingly powerful and influential group of extremists have declared war on the world, and they are prepared to kill and destroy anything and everything that opposes them.

We must not sugarcoat the reality of the threat we face. Left untrammeled, real lives and real liberties will continue to be lost. Now is the time for the community of nations to unite against terror and barbarism and use all the resources at their disposal to eradicate this global menace to life and liberty. For its part, the Church Universal is bound by its fealty to Jesus Christ to confront honestly the plight of its spiritual brethren, to lobby for intervention, and to aid in whatever way possible those, like the Syrian Christians, who are facing eradication at the hands of merciless persecutors.

I am confident that Christ’s church will endure and ultimately prevail over the powers – both spiritual and physical – that would destroy her. But Christ’s promise of ultimate victory does not mean we don’t have a real role to play in the here and now. We do, and we must honor our duty to defend the faith, wherever it is threatened and whatever the cost.

There has been much partisan and race-centric commentary about the police lately, and good amount of it is deserved, but a recent story in the National Review reminds us that questions about the state of our American police are an important bipartisan, cross-racial question. Regardless of your knee-jerk response to the latest Fox News or MSNBC “breaking story”, you should be asking yourself: What do we want our police to look like?

National Review reports on ongoing “John Doe” investigations during Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s tenure. The merits of the investigations are a debate for another article, but the methods of the police in obtaining evidence are highly problematic. These investigations were prompted by a left-leaning Milwaukee County Executive office working with the Milwaukee County District Attorney. At first blush, they are fairly unremarkable – one political group searching for dirt on another. But the investigations have a troubling method:

“[Milwaukee District Attorney] Chisholm… petitioned, in May 2010, to open a “John Doe” investigation, a proceeding under Wisconsin law that permits Wisconsin officials to conduct extensive investigations while keeping the target’s identity secret (hence the designation “John Doe”).

“John Doe investigations alter typical criminal procedure in two important ways: First, they remove grand juries from the investigative process, replacing the ordinary citizens of a grand jury with a supervising judge. Second, they can include strict secrecy requirements not just on the prosecution but also on the targets of the investigation. In practice, this means that, while the prosecution cannot make public comments about the investigation, it can take public actions indicating criminal suspicion (such as raiding businesses and homes in full view of the community) while preventing the targets of the raids from defending against or even discussing the prosecution’s claims.”

What followed was disturbing. The initial John Doe case turned into a multi-pronged attack which included numerous additions and a second wave that expanded the investigations beyond Walker people and to a broader set of conservatives. All approved by the same judge, all authorizing the collection of massive amounts of personal data. Most disturbingly, the NR piece chronicles multiple instances of intrusive police action in processing the John Doe cases. Police came into houses in the middle of the night, confiscated personal property, and told the families that, per the John Doe requirements, they couldn’t talk about the investigation with anyone.

These families had their lives turned upside down in the middle of the night and couldn’t tell anyone what was happening, which prompts the question – is this what we want from our police? Aggressively intruding on a family in the middle of the night (with a battering ram in hand in at least one instance)? Telling them they can’t talk about it?

Conservatives tend to defend the police, and for good reason. Police are our most local form of governmental force, they stand for law and order, and, ideally, they serve to protect and secure our lives, families, and property. And most of them do a fantastic job.

Unfortunately, that job has been changing in recent years. One important factor is the Department of Defense 1033 Program that allows local police to reuse excess military equipment, particularly for drug and counter-terrorism efforts. Most of this equipment is unremarkable, but this program has provided local police with some pretty intense military weaponry, including grenade launchers and armored vehicles. A recent White House report explained that “4% of the Pentagon’s output to police departments is military grade, including 92,442 small arms, 5,235 Humvees, 617 mine resistant vehicles and 616 aircraft.” The program’s motto is “From warfighter to crimefighter.”

That motto seems to be extending beyond the 1033 program. The warfighter and crimefighter are often one and the same. The Justice Department established a program to “[support] military veterans and the law enforcement agencies that hire them as our veterans seek to transition into careers as law enforcement officers.” We all appreciate the sacrifices our veterans make, but do we want to transition people directly from living on the battlefield to policing American towns and cities?

Most concerning are current police practices. SWAT tactics have taken a prominent place in police approaches to conflict. The ACLU put together a massive report on SWAT activity recently (click here to read it), or read this piece or some of the stories in this excerpt from the recent book Rise of the Warrior Cop.

Or, if you don’t have time to dig into any of those, look at images likethese and consider whether that’s what we want our police to look like today.

Some commentators, like Michaed Medved, object, pointing to our current crime rates as proof that the above developments are positive and necessary. (Violent crime is half what it was in 1991.) Unfortunately, the drop in crime does not correlate with these police developments, much less prove causation. Crime was dropping dramatically six years before the 1033 program started sending the big guns to police. Additionally, there are large host of other factors that contribute to a lower crime rate, including mass incarceration and the aging of America. Medved is right that most police “are the good guys,” but that doesn’t mean we should be giving the good guys this much power.

Questions of police power and jurisdiction are not matters of clear right and wrong or simplistic partisan commitments – they are broader questions of what we want our society to look like. Do we want our police to parallel our military in weapons and tactics? Do we want our warfighters to become our crimefighters? We have to weigh the potential benefits to police and society against the increased risks of police abuse and encroachment on our American liberties.

Unless we decide the police must change course, they will continue down this road. They will amass greater weaponry and become more adept at SWAT tactics. Why wouldn’t they? Imagine yourself as an officer – would you say no to additional funds or tools that would help you to ensure safety for your men and women just because your escalated enforcement might be perceived as excessive? Power aggrandizes itself inevitably, and the federal money will continue to accelerate police power. There is no inherent incentive to reverse course.

This discussion isn’t simple, since the tension between freedom and security is ever present, so we need to step back and look at the current picture and the future we would like to see. Answers like “You should trust the police to do their job” or “It’s fine with me if it helps to protect the police” or “If you don’t do anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about” are all too simplistic. We have a duty to set expectations for our local police. We must decide: What do we want our police to look like and how involved do we want them to be in fixing social problems? How large is their purview and how strong their hand? We can’t write them a blank check or we’ll lose our liberties paying for it.

“Together we can do something beautiful for God.” – Mother Teresa of Calcutta

My grandfather, who turns 92 this year, has lived most of his life on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee, in a middle-class suburban home nestled amid three acres of land. He has a tree-lined creek at the edge of the backyard, and the neighborhood houses – simple, yet varied in architectural design – serve as artifacts in a sense, reminding us of the beauty of uniqueness in times past. Indeed, in this day and age, large yards and neighborhoods brimming with structures of varying shapes, sizes and designs have gone out of vogue. As a result, many of the cookie-cutter housing and commercial developments popping up in our communities are impoverishing our sensitivity to beauty and preventing our neighborhoods from serving the sacramental function of drawing us closer to the Divine.

Recently, my wife and I began searching for a newly built home in a middle-class neighborhood where the environment is mostly natural, lot sizes are larger than an eighth of an acre, houses are not uniform throughout the block, and there are a few big trees in the area. Our search for a home within these parameters has been difficult. In the 1960’s, Joni Mitchell sang in Big Yellow Taxi, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Today, where my wife and I live and in many other suburban areas, they paved paradise and put up townhomes (at least Mitchell’s line has the delight of alliterative iambic pentameter).

Thomas Aquinas, one of the great philosophers and theologians of the Medieval period, believed beauty to be one of the five pathways to God. During the Medieval period, while many private homes were basic and practical, cathedrals and other public buildings were extravagantly constructed. Architects looked upon the world as a great sacrament, a channel to God in all its splendor of beauty, and they reflected that sacramental nature in painstakingly creating beautiful architecture, which lifted the mind to God and assisted in the onlooker’s eternal salvation. Few of our homes and neighborhoods reflect the sacramental outlook of Medieval artists and architects. The reasons for our desensitization to beauty and the desacramentalization of our communities are numerous, but I believe they are symptomatic of a materialism manifested in cost-efficiency, uniformity and a lack of natural green spaces.

In the construction of homes, cost-efficiency ranks high in importance. Real estate is expensive and governmental regulations have restricted how much space developers are given to build on tracts of land. This usually leads developers to pack in as many units as they can to make as big a profit as possible. Of course, developers will build only what buyers want to buy, or are willing to settle to buy. Be that as it may, the small yards might be pardoned if homes were more unique from one another in architectural design. As it is, the mass-produced, materialistic feel of so many neighborhoods seems to stem from a people who value money more than they value beauty and beauty’s connection to the Divine.

In his 2003 Lenten Message, Pope John Paul II connects today’s monomaniacal quest for money and the impoverishment of humanity when he says, “The quest for profit at any cost and the lack of effective, responsible concern for the common good have concentrated immense resources in the hands of a few while the rest of humanity suffers in poverty and neglect.” Although the pope is referring to a poverty of basic material necessities resulting from unbridled capitalism, this outlook contributes to desacramentalization and the loss of aesthetics in our neighborhoods.

Carrie Rollwagen, in her book The Localist, writes of how behemoth, “big box” corporations, along with consumers’ obsession for getting the best deal in the most efficient manner possible, aid in vanquishing beauty from our natural landscape. Rollwagen writes, “Wal-Marts aren’t surrounded by trees, ponds and walking paths; they’re surrounded by boxy architecture so bland that what used to be our communities can now be confused with a line of cereal boxes on the discount aisle. As most any designer or architect will tell you, this kind of monotony affects our psyches. A world devoid of curves and plants is bad for us as people, and putting efficiency and practicality before beauty has led to an ugly landscape.”

Is it possible, then, to prevent our further desensitization to beauty and to create homes and neighborhoods more sacramental in nature?

I think so, but before we can save our communities with beauty, we must first save our souls. To that end, we must strive to become more virtuous, more holy – and thus better sacraments – ourselves. “Unless souls are saved, nothing is saved,” Fulton Sheen writes in Peace of Soul. “Nothing happens in the external world that has not first happened within a soul.” And when we are on our way to becoming better channels of God’s grace, even though we may not all be real estate developers or government leaders, we can start doing three simple and practical things to aid in the beautification of our homes and communities.

First, we can scale back our busy lifestyles so that we have time to cultivate a deeper appreciation for our yards and to landscape them with more trees, shrubs and flowers. For those of us living in apartments or condominiums, we can at least landscape our porches or balconies with pots of flowers and plants. It doesn’t cost much or take much time, and it gets us outside more, where we might interact with a neighbor and breathe fresh air.

Second, we can beautify our neighborhoods by shopping at local businesses and farmers’ markets rather than big chain stores. In the long run, this will pave the way for the opening of more local businesses that provide unique services in unique aesthetic spaces. Although buying local sometimes costs more, frugality should not always trump beauty.

Third, we can keep abreast of proposed developments in our neighborhoods through local media outlets, which often report agenda items to be discussed at city and county planning commission meetings. These meetings often allow time for community residents to speak up about proposed commercial zonings and businesses trying to gain footholds in the community. City and county commissioners take our feedback seriously and, if enough residents speak out against a proposal, commissioners will take heed and vote against it.

If we start doing these simple things – no matter if we live in the city, suburbs or rural area, or are a common citizen or politician – we can begin to make an aesthetic, sacramental difference in our homes and neighborhoods. But if we merely settle for a dearth of natural and architectural aesthetics around us, our sensitivity to beauty and to God’s presence is at risk of being further impoverished. So let us return to the Medieval project of building a sacramental world and pray that our desire for beauty ultimately proves stronger than our desire for Mammon.

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Home is like a ghost— existing just out of reach—unattainable but unforgettable. A desire for a home is so deeply rooted, it seems essential to life. And yet no matter how pleasant the place we live, that longing is never satisfied. Like a ghost, this desire will not leave us alone. The only way to reconcile our bittersweet yearning for home is to learn how to live in the tension we feel.

When we speak about home, we are really talking about life, because home, in all its grit and glory, is the canvas where life happens. Home is that delightful magic that takes an ordinary place and transforms it into a place where you belong. At home we find the simple charms of living – coffee, fresh baked bread, fireplaces – which in themselves are so small as to be almost nothing. And yet, they are immeasurably important, the bones that hold us up. These delights of life are the lingering last notes of a song; that song was the perfect home we lost in Eden. And now, like all earthly things, home falls short of what it could be. Conflict, loss, poverty, and other ills abound. Home, we find, is another thread of the creation, fall, redemption tapestry of the Gospel. An ideal home does not fool us into thinking it is our permanent residence, but rather, it takes on just enough qualities of Eden to keep our hearts looking forward to our future reunion with Christ.

Echoes of Eden

Over the past three months, I have been semi-nomadic. My experience with home lately has been chaotic and tumultuous. For six weeks, I lived in my friends’ unfinished basement in a tent. There was something oddly homey about this tent—it reflected the place I vacated, with its books, shelves, and a memento or two. Our earthly homes are much the same way. As exiles of Eden, we try to recreate the qualities of that perfect home we lost.

Understanding home as God originally designed it can help us to understand what we were, and are, meant for. God made Eden as a place where life thrived, and where people flourished. In particular there were three aspects of the garden that supported human flourishing: place, purpose, and people.

After God created Adam in Genesis 2, the next thing He did was to create Eden, Adam’s home. The Lord filled the garden with good things: trees with delicious fruit, rivers, and rare stones. Our hearts feel most at home in a beautiful space, because God made us to enjoy and dwell in beauty. This beauty can be personal. I love gardens, wood floors, and rooms with lots of windows. For you, an attractive home may look different. It is the space itself that is important.

Later in verse 15, God put man into the Garden to work and keep it. In perfection, there was stewardship. God made us to be active agents in His world. We flourish as we help the world around us flourish. The possibilities for this are numerous: I know many people who keep vegetable gardens, or raise chickens in their back yards. One woman I know spins her own wool and makes blankets for the house. I know an engineer who creates efficient spaces within his home. We are rooted to place: we are drawn to its beauty, and we desire to protect it. But nothing is so important to home as the people we share life with.

Often quoted, in Genesis 2:18 God says, “It is not good for man to be alone.” In God’s order, love produces life in us and in the world around us. We need companionship, and the good things God created are more fully enjoyed when we share them with others. This happens through community, whether through family or the larger communities in which we live. We long for days with no more broken and lonely hearts.

Having a healthy nostalgia towards Eden can help us understand our restlessness for the world God intended. Most importantly, Eden is where we walked with God, our heart’s greatest desire. To remember Eden is to remember Him, and through those memories to remind ourselves of the future restoration He promises.

Remembering Calypso after the Fall

The poet Tennyson said, “Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” But while loving and losing may be the better choice, it is also the more painful one. Talking about the ideal of Eden is wonderful, until the real world hits and we realize we can never work hard enough to bring Eden back. This loss is what is so particularly painful about home.

To me, the pain of losing Eden is like the pain of losing a loved one. When I stumble on their picture, or see a sweater they wore all the time, my heart lurches at the memory. There are some forms of grief we should hold close to our hearts—they are precious because of what they represent. These sorrows come concurrently with joy. We cannot have the goodness of Eden or of God’s Restoration, without the pain now. An empty ideal, full of sentimental promises, can be more treacherous than suffering.

The physical and spiritual needs of the world, and the loss of Eden, should break our hearts. They should keep us longing for Christ to restore the earth. How does the knowledge that this is not our true home change how we live today? How much of our energy is spent on crafting comfortable earthly homes? How much of our time and effort do we expend on achieving good things for ourselves now? God has given us many blessings, and these are good to enjoy without shame. However, it is worth remembering that we don’t need to work toward our own material good now, because God is working for our future good. J.R.R. Tolkien, says: “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”1 Since love is mingled with grief, let us learn to live with our grief. Sometimes, our greatest hopes hurt us.

During Odysseus’s long and treacherous journey, Calypso offers him a reprieve from his struggle to return home, and temporarily helps him forget his wife. Calypso retains Odysseus for eight years, his greatest distraction. Sometimes Satan confronts us with trials, but often, he tries to convince us there is nothing wrong at all. God made us for a beautiful world, with perfect relationships, a sense of belonging, and a role in supporting the flourishing of life. To remember these things will cause heartache, but to forget them for empty pleasures here, is to forget who we are.

Living in the Tension

Living with grief is not easy; in fact, it is impossible. The only way we can manage it is through Christ Himself, who gives us comfort and strength. He has brought about our hope, and He reminds us of His promise. From Eden we shape our ideals of home as God intended it to be. However, in the reality of the loss of perfection, these ideals are unattainable (And anyone who says otherwise is selling something).

So what should our homes look like now while we wait? Here are a few characteristics that offer at least a place to start building a healthy (fallen) home.

In a world full of pain, home should be a place that supports recovery and healing. Home should be a place where you can cry. There is conflict at home too, but it is important to be able to learn to heal, and to forgive, at home. Home should be a place that does not actively perpetuate temptation or sin. For instance, a struggling alcoholic would best not take residence in a bar. Though we can’t eliminate sin from our lives, homes that encourage deep-rooted habits of sin and addictive behaviors are a cancer to home and those within it.

Home should be hospitable – in the largest sense of the word. Not only should we have open doors and invite people into our homes, but those within a home should also be hospitable towards each other. The more we practice openness and vulnerability, the more others can come alongside us to encourage and support. Homes where people have walls between one another become places where growth is slowed, and we lose our ability to live fruitfully in the tension of beauty and pain.

Home is phantasmal. We long for the ideal of home and are ever searching for Eden, but our hearts will not find their rest until Christ returns. Till that time, we should pursue beauty, but accept pain, and constantly remember the hope for home that we have in Christ’s promise to us. The best that home can do on earth is to remind us of the true goodness we long for, but not to pretend to satisfy our desires. If we spend our lives listening to those echoes of Eden which bounce around in our very own rafters, then we may find that, like Psyche in C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, we can say, “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing [for home]… to find the place where all the beauty came from… For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.”2 Though now we are exiles in a distant land, we know that one day we will return home.

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Our symposium on Home in a Changing World is drawing to a close, and we want to thank all of our readers, writers, and editors for their hard work and participation! These essays have delved deeply into our topic, exploring concepts of home, family, and culture from many angles. Through them, we’ve been asked to consider questions like what home looks like for the homeless, how we see home with new eyes after returning to it, what home may mean for children who have lived in multiple countries since a young age, how to fashion and fill our homes, and how our homes might prefigure our heavenly home.

We also saw the concept of home play out in multiple works of art, including Huck Finn’s rejection of false homes, the strange but loving home in Howl’s Moving Castle, the contrasting types of homes at play in Anna Karenina, and the impact of the American spirit on homes in True Grit.

We’ve been led to reconsider how we need to value our real family connections over our self-centered house designs and manic busyness. We’re reminded that we must look for opportunities to be hospitable and not let the ideals of the perfect home (or the Pinterest home) get in the way of opening our homes to others. We’ve been shown great examples of how essential the liturgies and routines of the home are to the well being of families. And we’ve seen how vital the small particulars, personal experiences, and memories of our homes can be to understanding both ourselves and our broader world.

Home has always been a central reality of the human experience, and we are wise to consider the questions it asks and the answers we might have in response. But at the end of the day, we all return to some kind of home, where the ideas must be woven into the fabric of lived reality. Whatever the texture of your home life, above all we hope that you come away from this Symposium with a renewed awareness of vital truths about your own home and a fresh intentionality, perhaps even eagerness, about the life you live in it and from it.

We have truly enjoyed this conversation with you and our writers and are eager for it to continue within your own homes!

Sincerely,
The Home Symposium Editors

Special Guest Editor

Liz Horst holds a degree in English literature from Grove City College. She works as a Suzuki violin teacher in the Washington, D.C. area and, in her spare time, enjoys immersing herself in great books and poetry.

JJI Editor

Anna Smith holds an MA in biblical studies from Westminster Seminary California and a BA in political science from Geneva College. She works at Westminster and lives in Southern California with her husband, where she loves the ocean but misses her native Midwest. She (mostly re-)tweets @AnnaSpeckhard.

JJI Editor

Lauren Bobbitt, a 2009 John Jay Institute fellow, has a background in literature and earned her MA at Marquette University. She currently works in communications for an organic dairy farm, where she enjoys the smell of manure and striving to reflect the good life in her living and writing.

JJI Managing Editor

Zachary Gappa has a degree in Political Theory from Patrick Henry College and currently works as both Managing Editor for the John Jay Institute’s Center for a Just Society and Operations Manager at Gappa Security Solutions. Most recently he has been enjoying trying to stay warm in Wisconsin while planning family activities for Summer.

]]>http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/home-a-conclusion/feed/1The Fruit of Abortion’s Poisonous Treehttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org/the-fruit-of-abortions-poisonous-tree/
http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/the-fruit-of-abortions-poisonous-tree/#commentsMon, 20 Apr 2015 13:30:28 +0000http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/?p=39469Why Staying Strong in Our Defense of Life is so Important

Presidential candidate Rand Paul made headlines last week by turning the rhetorical tables on Progressives on the issue of abortion. When pressed by the media to articulate specifically his position on abortion, Paul responded:

“Why don’t we ask the DNC: Is it okay to kill a seven-pound baby in the uterus? You go back and you ask Debbie Wasserman Schultz if she’s OK with killing a seven-pound baby that is not born yet. Ask her when life begins, and you ask Debbie when it’s okay to protect life. When you get an answer from Debbie, get back to me.”

Paul’s point is well-made. For years, Conservatives have been made to play defense on the issue of abortion while pro-choice Progressives wear the white hats. The venerated “right to choose” has become so deeply ingrained into the cultural milieu that Progressives long ago abandoned any serious attempt to justify their position on abortion. The media has happily fostered this trend and continues to do so. You can bet that Hillary Clinton won’t be pressed to flesh out the details of her position on abortion – when, if ever, she considers the life of an unborn child as equal to or more important than the “choice rights” of its mother. She will be allowed, as Debbie Wasserman Schultz was, to don her anti-government-interference hat (without a trace of irony, mind you) and consign the fate of the unborn, no matter their weight or gestational age, to the irreproachable relationship of that between a woman and her doctor. She will retain her mantle as a women in ideological step with Progressive-minded, liberated women everywhere. The base will be appeased and the media will be free to continue caricaturing pro-lifers as misogynistic knuckle-draggers whose vision for America would have women perpetually barefoot and pregnant and in the home where they belong.

At a recent summit hosted by the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, Paul doubled-down on his pro-life position and his challenge to Democrats:

“We should ask the other side, do you think there’s nothing special about life? Do you think there are no rights involved in a seven- and eight- and nine-pound baby? . . . We do have a debate: Where does life begin? . . . Shouldn’t the other side have to justify why this baby doesn’t have any rights? . . . One of the main roles the government has is to [prevent] you from harming another individual, which gets us back to the original debate: where life begins. You can’t have liberty if you don’t protect where your liberty originates from and that is a right to life.”

Kudos to Rand Paul for pressing the American people to consider this issue in a different light, and for reminding Americans that beyond the rhetoric and political intimidation there is a serious ethical debate to be had on the question of abortion. Indeed, the need for this debate is more urgent than ever, for the pro-choice side has only become more emboldened in their claims with each passing year. In the abhorrent tradition of Peter Singer, some bioethicists have begun to embrace infanticide as a perfectly reasonable solution to the hardship and inconvenience sometimes imposed by the birth of a child.

The basic argument being advanced is that a human being is only fully human when they possess the intellectual faculties necessary to appreciate the fact of their own existence and to desire their continued existence. Since a baby lacks this kind of self-awareness, so the argument goes, it’s not really a human being yet and thus has no more rights than it did when it was a fetus in utero. If it’s legal to kill a fetus then, it should be legal to kill an infant. There is no moral difference.

It is difficult to fully appreciate the level of depravity, the chilling inhumanity, of such logic. One has to wonder if these so-called bioethical “experts” are themselves parents, and if so, how they justify this abhorrent philosophy to their children. “Be grateful you weren’t a social, economic, or psychological burden to your mother and me, Junior, or it might have been an after-birth abortion for you.”

That this proposition is even embraced as a legitimate contribution to the field of bioethics is indicative of what happens when a society defines itself by it’s unwillingness to recognize and adhere to fixed, universal limits. Reject traditional morality, cast off the bounds of religion, place the individual at the center of the moral universe and you have the perfect recipe for a culture in which virtually everything is permissible. This is the conversation we need to be having. Democratic candidates for office need to be made to answer for their ideological position on this issue – made to answer whether or not they believe an infant is a human being with rights and inherent value, and made to answer whether their vision of a just society is one in which a person’s right to life is left to the semantic manipulations of bioethicists and politicians.

Democrats should be made to answer these questions, for this is where the disposable man mentality of their beloved Roe v. Wade takes us. When you adopt flawed premises at the beginning, disorder and perversion follows. The Roe v. Wade decision was premised on the fact that an unborn baby is not a person. Never mind that it may have 10 fingers and toes, a unique genetic code, the capacity to feel pain or even the ability to survive independently outside the mother’s body. The venerable men in black issued their edict from on high that none of this matters in light of a women’s inviolable “right to choose” which emanates from the penumbra of their “right to privacy.” Somewhere along the way we lost sight of the subject of this “choice” and as a result nearly 60 million babies have paid with their lives.

Ideas have consequences, and humanity is reaping the tragic consequences of some very bad ideas. Progressives – as they like to call themselves – believe that mankind is on a steady and inevitable march towards utopia and it is only by eliminating our dependence on the “God of the gaps” and learning to place faith in ourselves that we can achieve true actualization as a species. This philosophy has yielded a society in which pro-choice candidates are given a free pass on the abortion question and proponents of infanticide are accepted as legitimate participants in the public conversation. Here’s hoping Candidate Paul and his fellow Republicans press to change the terms of the debate and that they are successful in reminding the American people of what’s truly at stake when we talk about a woman’s right to choose.

“Oasis.” It is such a calming word; we all hear it, and we want to disappear – to bathe in the crystal blue waves of the Mediterranean or sip a Margarita under the sunlit palms on the coast of Mexico.

When you look up “oasis” in a dictionary, you will find that it has several definitions – the first of which describes an area in a desert surrounded by lush foliage and fresh water. The remaining definitions are sprinkled with phrases like “refuge from,” “retreating to,” and “escaping from.” We in modern America generally use the term “oasis” as a catch-all word that describes a desperate cry to escape from the stresses of modern life. Even the apartment complex where my husband and I live – in the middle of the dry, desert-scape of Colorado – is called “The Oasis Apartments.”

But today, the ideal of an “oasis” has also attached itself to the search for master bedrooms among today’s homebuyers, and developers have caught on and designed their bedroom suites to become that longed-for place of refuge. However, whether the designers realize it or not, the way modern bedrooms are designed, for both adults and children, is shaping the family and may even be contributing to isolation and fragmentation in what were, a few decades ago, healthier communities.

My husband and I have a guilty pleasure: watching HGTV and reveling in home design makeovers and renovation jobs in older outdated residences. It’s loads of fun, but it gives you a striking look into the psychology of today’s homebuyers, particularly those interested in single family homes. We’ve probably watched fifty episodes, and I can’t remember a single episode where the buyers of the homes didn’t use the word “oasis” in relation to their master-bedroom.

Today’s society has changed when it comes to the nuclear family. I have seen it over the years in my work with youth in various communities: today’s family has become more secluded and less involved in volunteering and outreach, becoming instead more self-oriented and inwardly focused. It seems that this widespread and unfortunate trend was set, often unintentionally, by many well-meaning parents. The parents of today’s young children and teenagers do their utmost to drive their kids into success. These efforts are all well-intentioned, but they play out in an unhealthy way: Boy scouts, band, ballet, soccer, character-building camps, piano lessons, and tutoring have all consumed the parents’ time so that they leave the house at six and don’t come home until 9:00 at night. The parents, who once swore “til death do us part,” suddenly are “parted” every day, all day, until exhaustion drives them into separation emotionally, physically and relationally.

In this light, the desire for a master “oasis” makes sense; the parents have a subconscious desire to rekindle their romance – and not necessarily in a sexual way. They simply feel the desperate need to relax and reinvigorate themselves and their relationship before the rat-race of life drives them mad.

And unfortunately, the master bedroom is not the only room in the house that has expanded, to detrimental effect. Bedrooms in general have gotten bigger, and grown in number. Family sizes are shrinking, but bedroom numbers and bedroom sizes are growing.

Sometime within the last 15-20 years it became disgraceful for two children to share the same bedroom. If parents have a five bedroom house and four kids, two boys and two girls, each child will have their own room, rather than each gender sharing a room and leaving at least one room available for other family activities or guest accommodations.

I remember watching one episode of HGTV’s “Love it or List it” in which a couple had a three-year-old daughter with a massive bedroom, large bed, princess toys, bookshelves and ample space, but they told the real-estate agent that it was “unfair” to their daughter to give her so little space to use as she pleased. What does this lavishness do to the child?

This societal demand to give children individual rooms and to increase those room sizes simply gives the children more excuses to lock themselves in their rooms and avoid contact with each other. The kids turn to social media, video or internet games, and sadly even, and all too often, porn. No guidance from parents (usually simply because they are too busy) and no contact with siblings increases the solitude of each child, and they miss out on the beauty and goodness of conflict and resolution, love and encouragement, and accountability.

Though sharing a room with siblings creates conflicts of its own, the benefits far outweigh those conflicts.When I was a child, I witnessed the seclusion instigated by separate bedrooms in my friends’ homes, and as I grew older, I began to recognize the contrast to my own family’s experience. In my childhood home, two boys and two girls each shared bedrooms in a very small house, and, partly due to sharing these small spaces with each other, became best friends. We fought, and we made up. We got jealous, and we got over it. We shared secrets whispered in the dark of night, played pranks on each other, and told stories after lights’ out that created memories for years to come. That relationship and those memories were so precious to my sister that she lovingly mentioned them in her maid-of-honor toast at my wedding.

It is not a simple solution; decreasing bedroom size and sharing living spaces does not necessarily solve all of these relational problems. But these seemingly minor adjustments can play a large role in defining who the family is as a whole and who the members become as individuals. I don’t think anyone can blame today’s parents for wanting a “master-oasis” – a place of their own away from the children where they can live adult lives. But a spa bathroom with a rainfall showerhead, jetted tubs, and a king-sized bed with multi-thousand dollar bedding is not the answer.

A home with less individualized space and more community-based “hang-outs” is much more conducive to healthy, happy people. Such a home would have rooms designed for and dedicated to communal activities: music rooms for mini “concerts” or sing-alongs around the piano on holidays; parlors where girlfriends can gather and share coffee, crumpets and conversation; that old-fashioned smoking room complete with cigar boxes, brandy, and business talk; large oversized dining rooms for hosting guests and loved ones; family rooms centered around conversation spaces instead of the television; and other such purposefully designed spaces. Through such rooms , our homes can help us give back to society by living generously and living well and, in turn, living the beautiful life we all long to live.

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]]>http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/the-oasis-mirage/feed/0Finding Home When Homelesshttp://www.centerforajustsociety.org/finding-home-when-homeless/
http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/finding-home-when-homeless/#commentsSun, 19 Apr 2015 03:40:44 +0000http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/?p=39450What does home mean for those without steady houses?

“We must recover the whole sense of gift, of gratuitousness, of solidarity. Rampant capitalism has taught the logic of profit at all costs, of giving to get, of exploitation without looking at the person… and we see the results in the crisis we are experiencing! This Home [homeless shelter] is a place that teaches charity, a “school’ of charity, which instructs me to go encounter every person, not for profit, but for love.”

This is a quote from my favorite homily by Pope Francis. When I first read it in 2014, I was on top of the world. By the standards of the world, I had made it. After growing up in poverty, I had attended college on a full scholarship, had graduated with honors and two bachelors degrees, and was now preparing for the comprehensive examinations to complete my graduate program. I was the American “success story,” the child who escaped the cycle of poverty through hard work, getting into college and earning multiple degrees. My future was bright, and I was filled with joy, knowing how blessed I was by God.

Nine months later, I was once again reading the same homily from Pope Francis. Although the words on the page remained the same, my life could not have changed more radically. I had been a happy graduate, newly employed with my dream job; a few short months later, I was homeless.

The last week I spent in my dream apartment was the week before Thanksgiving. The majority of my possessions were in storage, all except my mattress, a duffle bag of clothes, my laptop, and a stack of books. It was one of the most difficult weeks of my life, sitting in the emptiness of that apartment, thinking of my failures and lost dreams, anticipating that at the end of the week, I would not even have the empty space. While others would sit down to give thanks, enjoy a great meal, and spend time with family, I would hand in the keys to my apartment, to my home, all alone.

“It will only be for a few days, maybe a month,” I told myself. I had plenty of interviews scheduled and applications sent out. People were networking and making calls. Even more people were praying for me. Something was going to come through soon.

At this point, it has been a little over four months since I became homeless.

My homelessness came from trying to escape the poverty I grew up in and, by the world’s standards, failing. As a former perfectionist, that word makes my heart ache when I use it to describe my own life. This experience has been both humbling and humiliating.

Most of my days, (which I call dignity challenging days), I am treated in terms of profit. There is a point where someone looks at me and decides that I am not worth the cost. My dream job decided not to keep me on, and the jobs I apply to now decide I’m not worth the risk. It is hard, especially when I feel that I have done everything right: I worked hard, I overcame everything thrown at me, and I stayed out of trouble. I am fortunate that I have never had to sleep on the street or in my car; many people have made sure I have somewhere to sleep, and for that I am most grateful. But there does not seem to be an end in sight for me, and it seems harder to hope as more weeks go by and nothing changes.

I never really knew just how much home, even the broken ones, have meant to me until I have been without a bed to call my own. The temptation to be sad and to despair can be crippling. I often cry and miss my bed. I long for a home that no longer exists.

Missing my home causes me many different kinds of daily suffering. I am constantly worried that those who have taken me in will see me as a burden and will throw me out one day. Part of this distrust comes from never having a completely stable home, but I also worry because I have not known everyone whom I have stayed with.

When you try to escape poverty and fail, it is often worse for you than it was before. I am exhausted from trying to get help, being treated like a criminal, and then trying to navigate the terrible systems of both governmental and charitable aid, which sometimes take the humanity out of the process of giving and receiving. I know that there are many out there who abuse these systems and take advantage, but I hope that I am never one of them. Even just a small bit of help could make it easier.

My chronic illnesses are often made worse by environmental changes, so the more I move around, the sicker I get. The longer I am continuously sick, the harder it gets to function and be able to help myself.

Then there are the more shallow problems that feed into the bigger ones.

The constant moving around makes it impossible to get anything done. I feel scattered in all aspects of my life, and I feel that I run out of time to get so little completed. There is the brokenness and the emotional complexities I suffer through: worry, about not getting everything done because a delay means a missed opportunity that could change my situation; sadness, when I am tired and want to go take a nap, or have a moment to myself, and I have nowhere to go; rejection, because I have had many, many friends leave me or mistreat me since I became homeless; criticism, because since I failed in the eyes of the world, I suddenly am incapable of having opinions or making decisions without receiving judgment; disregard, because I have so many gifts, talents, and skills that are going unused even by the people who know they are there; helplessness, because my survival is dependent completely on the generosity and kindness of others; and finally, theloss of things that make you feel like a human being. It is no longer fun to socialize with people because I can’t relate anymore, because discussions can be hurtful, or because as a homeless person, I am judged. Often in conversations about careers or life matters, I feel that many people no longer trust my opinions because I have failed at obtaining a career and maintaining my own life. Once again, I am seen in terms of profit, even in my own social circles.

One of my friends recently told me how much she values the time I still spend in trying to socialize. She said I do not make others feel bad about their wealth and the way they choose to spend it. She said that, to her, my presence was worth more than any cost to have me there.

In her kind words, my friend reminded me of what home actually is and what family is to me.

My family right now are the hundreds of people who are praying for me, the dozens who have come to my assistance in providing me with food, shelter, and clothing, and most especially the handful of people who wipe my tears when I cry and hold my hand in the difficult moments. My home is in the many homes where I have stayed throughout the last few months, especially the ones where I am welcomed with open arms, being taught to grow in patience, trust, hope, and openness, and receiving the gift of mutual love, without expectation, judgment, or qualification.

The home I am living in right now as I write this, is a place of the most unexpected, deepest healing and consolation. I never imagined that I could find that in a time like this. Even when things are at their worst, God is still full of beautiful surprises. I am not any less blessed than I was before, but instead I am even more blessed to be able to be stripped materially in order to know God. Though the burden is heavy, the ache is deep, and the temptation to give up is overwhelming, I cannot lose hope, which is even greater. One day, I will find that house that God is building for me, where no stone goes unused or is rejected, and all of this will be a memory that, I hope, allows me to help others. I desire to be seen, not for profit, but for love, and that is how I hope I can change the world for others who are marginalized and rejected through the brokenness of home. This part of my life is a time given by God, to prepare me for an extraordinary home and family that awaits me.

What do you think of this article?

Write a short response. It’ll get sent to our symposium editors and, if approved, added to the symposium. People who read this article will see your response immediately following, and we’ll promote your contribution individually to the John Jay Institute’s network.